1 Introduction #
SUSE® Linux Enterprise Micro allows upgrading from an existing system to the new version. No new installation is needed. Existing data, such as home and data directories and system configuration, is kept intact.
Upgrades between two releases of SUSE Linux Enterprise Micro are supported by SUSE. Whether it is better to upgrade or perform a fresh installation depends on your specific scenario. While upgrades involve less work, fresh installations ensure you benefit from all the new features of a release such as disk layout changes, specific filesystem features, and other improvements. To get the most out of your system, SUSE therefore recommends fresh installations in most scenarios.
In both cases—upgrade as well as a fresh installation—customers need to check if system settings and default values still fit their requirements.
1.1 SLE Micro lifecycle #
SLE Micro is released twice a year—major versions are released every two years.
SLE Micro comes with 4 years of general support. For detailed information about the SLE Micro life cycle, refer to http://www.suse.com/lifecycle.
The general support includes the following features:
Technical Services
Access to patches, fixes, documentation and the SUSE Knowledge base
Support for existing stacks and workloads
Support for new deployments
Enhancement requests
Hardware enablement and optimization
Driver updates via SUSE SolidDriver Program
Backport of fixes from recent minor versions
Security updates
Defect resolution